Mageia 2 upgrade testing - we're ready for more testers

[davidwhodgins]

I ran a test today, upgrading from Mageia 1 to Cauldron,
as part of the qa testing for Mageia 2.

On my 7 year old i586 system, a Mageia 1 install containing
Gnome, KDE, and LXDM, the upgrade install of 2,187 packages
took about 2 hours. There were no package or file conflicts.

There was one postinstall scriptlet that failed, which has
been reported and already fixed.

There was one postuninstall scriplet that failed, which will
likely result in an update for Mageia 1.

Neither of these two bugs caused any problems in the resulting
installation.

This is the cleanest upgrade distribution version upgrade I've
ever seen.

The only other problem I saw, were that, after installing 2100
packages in one transaction, the distribution dialog appeared
to hang, for about 20 minutes. A little checking during the
apparent hang, showed that is was processing 260,516 file
triggers.

After the delay, the dialog saying to reboot, just closed when
the reboot button was selected. After manually rebooting, the
system came up properly, with everything working, that I checked.

The upgrade testing has reached the point where the testing
needs a wider variety of hardware and package selection, so
more testers would be appreciated. If you have the time, and
available disk space, please consider trying out the upgrade
procedure, and reporting any problems found.

Note that, at this point in time, upgrade testing will result
in an installation that will get it's updates from the Cauldron
repositories, which by their nature, can be unstable at times.
Don't use this for a production system! Make sure you have
a full backup, and tested restore procedures, just in case.

The easiest way to test the upgrading from Mageia 1 to
Cauldron, is to open a terminal and run the commands
$ sudo urpmi --auto-update
$ killall mgaapplet
$ mgaapplet --testing &
Then select the More information button on the dialog
that opens up, and follow the prompts.

During my test, 1.1GB of data was downloaded to /var,
so make sure you have the space available. Also, make
sure /boot has at least 24MB of free space.

The update can also be done using a boot.iso image
as described at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Boot.iso_install
The boot.iso can be downloaded from
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... ll/images/
or
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... ll/images/
or the corresponding directory of your favourite mirror.

Both of the above methods require a reasonably fast and
stable internet connection.

A third option, would be using the beta 2 dvd iso image,
which can be downloaded from
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... /cauldron/
Note that a lot of bugs have been fixed since the beta 2
iso images were created. Be sure to install updates as
part of the installation, or use "urpmi --auto-update"
after the first reboot. Do not use rpmdrake from the beta
2 iso.

There are some known bugs that are being worked on, but
have workarounds available.

If you have /usr on a lvm logical volume, the initrd from
the upgrade will fail to boot. The workaround for this
is to add the kernel option rd.break=pre-pivot during the
first boot.

To edit the kernel options, press f3 on the grub selection
menu, then select defaults, the type a space followed by
the option, then press enter.

Once the system starts to boot, a bash shell will open up
where you can enter the commands ...
# lvm vgchange -a y
# exit
A second shell will open after the pivot to the new root.
Just type in "exit" again, and press enter.
Once the system has booted, open a terminal and run the
command
$ sudo dracut -f
That will create a new initrd, that will properly mount
the /usr on a logical volume, for future boots.

This bug is being tracked in
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4562

Another problem that requires a workaround for now, is
that for some (most?) ide controllers, the order of
the loading of kernel modules will result in ide hard
drives being assigned /dev/hd? instead of /dev/sd?.
Also, ide cd/dvd drives will be assigned /dev/hd?
instead of /dev/sr?, making them inaccessible.

If your system has ide drives, before upgrading, run
the command
$ lspcidrake|grep IDE

The first part of the output is the kernel module that
should be used for the ide controller on your system.
It will be something like pata_via, pata_amd, or
ata_piix. Make note of which module is used.

After the upgrade, modify /boot/grub/menu.lst, to add
the option rdloaddriver=pata_via (replacing pata_via
with the module used for your ide controller.

This bug is being tracked in
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4997

The more people we have testing now, the better chance we
have of having a great release, when Mageia 2 is released.

Remember, Mageia 2 is a community release. The more people
who contribute, the better the release will get. You can
help too.

The qa team could really use more people. When Mageia 2 does
get released, our workload will double, as many updates will
require testing in both Mageia 1 and 2.

Even if you can only put in a few hours per week, every bit
helps. All you have to do to join, is subscribe to two
mailing lists, then pick updates you have the hardware
and software needed to test, and start testing, reporting
your results on bugzilla.

See https://wiki.mageia.org/en/QA_Team for more details.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

[farfouille]

Hi

Coming from https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3466#c74, sent by Dave Hodgins, and after a careful reading of its previous post, I'm still asking myself how to test the proposed packages.

But, let summarize the use case:
Problem : how can someone test proposed packages that play role during the installation process of mageia (and that are not in an the iso) ?
Starting point :
- mageia iso (DVD of mga2b2 in this case)
- several rpms (drakx-kbd-mouse-x11-0.100-1.mga2, ldetect-lst-0.1.300-1.mga2 in this case)
- an USB key

Should we :
- build a new iso embedding the new packages ?
- put the iso into the USB key and then replace the packages with the new ones ?
- escape from the installation program at some point to replace the packages, (available DVD iso is not a live DVD)

To be more specific, I know how to :
- extract iso on disk but I don't know how to rebuild them
- put iso on USB key and boot on it (I use dd) but the result seems to be readonly and I can't replace packages

Any help appreciated

[jkerr82508]

I think that you might be best to try one of the online methods, described in David's post, that can be launched from within your existing Mageia 1 installation. (For this you need a Mageia 1 installation that is not required for critical tasks, since the upgrade process has not been QA'd. It could go wrong. That's why testing is required.)

To use the beta2 iso you need to boot from the usb key and select upgrade rather than install. Then update your upgraded system to the current cauldron. I doubt that it's possible to successfully modify the iso that you have.

An alternative is to wait for the beta3 DVD due about April 14th.

Jim

[doktor5000]

@David: FWIW, already saw the same posting style from wilcal, are you using a smartphone or tablet, because the linebreaks and the width of the posts definitely looks weird and enforced to me. Just curious ...

[davidwhodgins]

[quote="farfouille"]Hi

Problem : how can someone test proposed packages that play role during the installation process of mageia (and that are not in an the iso) ?
Starting point :
- mageia iso (DVD of mga2b2 in this case)
- several rpms (drakx-kbd-mouse-x11-0.100-1.mga2, ldetect-lst-0.1.300-1.mga2 in this case)
- an USB key

In this case, I'd suggest using either the boot.iso for a net install, or
the mgaapplet --testing, both of which will pick up the current cauldron
packages.

Alternatively, if you prefer using a dvd iso, wait until beta 3, which is
expected to be ready April 14th.

[davidwhodgins]

@David: FWIW, already saw the same posting style from wilcal, are you using a smartphone or tablet, because the linebreaks and the width of the posts definitely looks weird and enforced to me. Just curious ...

Sorry about that. I first wrote the article for a posting to the usenet
newsgroup alt.os.linux.mageia. I'm using opera, but manually break
each line, although I leave all html links unbroken. That's a habit
I developed when posting to usenet, so that usenet readers that
don't handle format=flowed don't get excessively long lines.
I then used copy and paste to create the articles for the General
discussion mailing list, and the forum post. If you search the forums
for my name, you'll see that it's very rare for me to post to the
forums. I mostly use the mailing lists, and bugzilla.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

[jkerr82508]

One point to add to David's post. If you are trying the mgaapplet method and aren't quick enough to click on the dialogue box before it disappears, you can launch the upgrade process by clicking on the blue arrow icon that appears in the system tray, where the red "updates" icon usually appears.

On my system the dialogue box was visible for only a few seconds and being old and slow I wasn't quick enough

Jim

[farfouille]

Thank you for your answers

But upgrading from mga1 to mga2 is not possible for me, my internet connexion is far too slow to do that just for a test (it takes about 10 hours to get the DVD iso).

So I will wait for the next beta that hopefully will be available as live CD (erf no ! Live CD will have radeon firmware and the test is about first boot without radeon firmware )

[doktor5000]

Sorry about that.

No need to be Was just curious about the cause ...

[filip]

I upgraded adjusted copy of working M1. I used a method "Via mgaapplet" first from wiki but it stalled during third hdlist download. Probably mirror issue but it works OK on M1 otherwise. Tried twice with the same results. I'm willing to try again but I need some directions.

So I decided to try also "Via a Mageia mirror" method. This one worked.

I hit some bugs:

• I already reported GRUB bug. Probably connected with one SATA and one PATA HD in this system.
• Very serious one is also that some daemons (httpd, mysqld and acpid) didn't start automatically. I had that trouble on DVD (on USB) upgrade before. I have to check if this bug report is similar. I didn't reboot yet to check if they start after that. Some daemons even don't remember selection to start on reboot in MCC.
• I also noticed that MCC fails to show all service state change.
• I need to investigate more how process kwin hijack CPU until I switch off desktop effects (Alt+ Shift + F12). Any suggestions?

urpme --auto-orphans shows 149 packages and a lot of them are mga2. Not sure how important/needed they are.

I had also a lot of mga1 remnants. More than 450! Any idea what to do about them?

[Ken-Bergen]

I had also a lot of mga1 remnants. More than 450! Any idea what to do about them?

Nothing.
Cauldron has thousands of packages from mga1 and the packagers have better things to do (more important) than repackaging things that haven't changed.

[doktor5000]

I had also a lot of mga1 remnants. More than 450! Any idea what to do about them?

Nothing.
Cauldron has thousands of packages from mga1 and the packagers have better things to do (more important) than repackaging things that haven't changed.

Well, actually it would have been better to have all those rebuilt against current libraries, but this was proposed too late during the development cycle.

[pmithrandir]

Thank you for your answers

But upgrading from mga1 to mga2 is not possible for me, my internet connexion is far too slow to do that just for a test (it takes about 10 hours to get the DVD iso).

So I will wait for the next beta that hopefully will be available as live CD (erf no ! Live CD will have radeon firmware and the test is about first boot without radeon firmware )

Hello.

I think the best way to upgrade for you is to use direct internet connection, and not to download the DVD.
If you have only one desktop env, you should get less datas.(6-800MB)
(that would take around 2-3 hours, perfect by night, or when you are out)

But, we should also explain to people that the beta is updated almost every day, sometime with huge download to do. It's not rare to have 1 or 200 MB to download per day...

[rollercomsolutions]

I did a fresh install of Mageia 1 KDE live 32 bit on my Dell Inspiron Laptop , updated it all the way and ran the suggested commands to upgrade to Mageia 2. Proccess went all the way till the Dialog box Successful just need to reboot so i clicked reboot and it didn't reboot. I waited about 3 minutes and decided to use the menu to reboot normal way and instead of rebooting it sat me at a tty login screen (just like clicking ctrl + alt F4 for example) so i waited to see if it would reboot and it just sat there. i logged in as root and tryed init 6. i got some message saying something about some other init (it had like four letters before init [****init] for example) init 0 the same message. then i just typed shutdown now and it shutdown. when i turned it back on i selected media sources and ran updates and system is running sweet Thanks for all your hard work, if i missed some details just ask me i'll get em for ya. ttyl hope i posted this in an okay spot, if not let me know where you would like to see these reports cause i have alot of hardware here i want to run tests and report to help out.

[saptech]

Well I finally took the plunge and upgraded my mga1 to mga2 (testing). Everything went fine execpt for this message early in the upgrade. This is the 32 bit version.

Code: Select all

Some requested packages can't be installed:
gstreamer0.10-farstream-0.1.1-4.mga2 (due to conflicts with gstreamer0.10-farsight2-0.0.31-4.mga2.i586)


I chose to continue and that it did. Since I have KDE4 and Gnome2 already installed it said it would upgrade around 3GB. It took about 5 1/2 hours, I'm using an ethernet Wimax 4G connection.

My specs are in my sig.

Great job Devs and everyone else involved in making Mageia one of the best distros to come out!